Be Missed and Remembered: The Letter from Mayoiga

I haven't fully finished this yet but I love the story that I have read so far! It will tug on your heart strings and make you want to know what happens to the characters! I cannot recommend it enough!

Be Missed and Remembered: The Letter from Mayoiga is an all age mystery kinetic visual novel developed by NEKONEKO SOFT and published by OVERLAP GAMES. NEKONEKO SOFT famous for heartfelt narrative titles that released on steam such as Narcissu, Ame no Marginal, Winter Polaris and Christmas Tina. All of these wonderful works are written by Kataoka Tomo. This game is split into 30 short chapters. Each chapter takes around 10 to 15 minutes to read, bringing the total playtime to roughly 10 hours. The story is set during the Japanese Showa Era, spanning the 1970s to the 1980s. Players take on the role of Matsuda Naofumi, who visits a quiet rural village alongside his cute brown haired younger sister Matsuda Risa. The siblings travel all the way from Tokyo to spend their summer vacation. They stay in their late grandparents old vacant house. Thanks to the warm and friendly local neighbors, the house remains clean and livable throughout the years. Aunt Tanaka one of the villager is incredibly kind and always reminds them to stay cautious. She warns them about a terrifying pitch black youkai monster that dwells deep within Oyama sacred mountain. The creature occasionally descends near the village during hot summer days and is said to bring terrible curses to anyone who encounters it. As someone who does not believe in ghosts or supernatural rumors, Naofumi only grows more curious instead of scared. He chooses to ignore the village warnings and decides to explore the mysterious mountain on his own. During his exploration, he discovers an ancient shrine named Mayoinaga. The shrine is normally completely submerged beneath the local lake, but extreme summer heat has dried up the water and exposed the hidden building. Driven by curiosity, Naofumi steps inside and reunites with a strange young girl known by villagers as Susu. She is a short black haired girl dressed in traditional old fashioned kimono and serves as the current guardian master of the shrine. Surprisingly, Naofumi first met her five years prior during his earlier visits to the village. The Mayoinaga shrine holds a bizarre supernatural rule. Time completely stops inside its boundaries. Anyone staying within the shrine will never age, never fall ill and never need food or rest. However, the moment you step out of the shrine grounds, you will lose all memories of everything that happened inside. This strange curse explains why almost no one dare to visit the shrine more than once. Naofumi is the only special exception who has managed to return and meet Susu multiple times across different years. The narrative freely jumps between different timelines with heartfelt flashback sequences. It shows Naofumi’s very first encounter with Susu back in his junior high school days. The story also moves forward to his college years, where his little sister Risa has already grown up and entered middle school. The siblings team up together to brainstorm all kinds of methods. They desperately try to break the terrifying memory curse, find a way to retain their memories of Susu. Whenever Susu leaves the shrine, she transforms into a frightening black monster form. The game also includes detailed flashbacks that reveal Susu’s back story. Players get to learn how she met the previous shrine master Wakako and how she eventually inherited the role as the new master of Mayoinaga. In terms of presentation, the game features stunning high quality character designs, expressive sprites and beautifully polished detailed CG scenes. Every single character including the male protagonist is fully voiced by professional voice actors that make the entire cast feel vivid, lively and genuine. The downside is that the game has no achievements. Summary Be Missed and Remembered: The Letter from Mayoiga is a kinetic visual novel set in a nostalgic Showa Era rural village, the game weaves a bittersweet supernatural tale about forgotten memories, irreversible fate and precious fleeting encounters. With well p…

Kataoka Tomo is a writer whose vns I generally really like, all brought me a lot of comfort and generally were pretty good. This year I already completed 3 vns which he either wrote in full or contributed to, and plan to read at least two more somewhere in the next 6 months/year. This kind of dedication also meant a lot of worrying about Koi Shikarubeki and questioning if I'll even like it, especially after first reviews came out. Either way, I was very hyped for this title ever since it was announced, and I liked the demo well enough, so I decided to focus on forming my own opinion and started it day one. I really like the atmosphere, which is mostly quite sad and even bleak at times, but cute and fun moments brighten it up a bit. Characters, especially our MC and his sister, carry a lot of hope that situation of the mysterious girl, Susu, will improve. To say it in the shortest way, it's a tale about memories and having hope. It's not scary at all - which can be a shame for some, and I saw people getting interested in it because it can seem scary at the first glance - but definitely more of a melancholic and touching read. It was very moving and even tears-inducing at times in my case. I really love titles like these, and I don't have many complains about the story itself, aside from a few places where something happens way too conveniently. I saw mixed opinions about fairly short chapters and the scenes ending abruptly. For me, shorter chapters are a pretty good idea which works well here, and I never felt like they were too short or abrupt, but the pacing is definitely on the faster side. Susu's situation is similar to one of Rin's in Ame no Marginal, it's also about a place where one person has to stay as a "master" for a very long time. The ideas of Mayoiga vs the world in Ame no Marginal are different enough, but still share some similar points. Susu herself is very shy, but opens slightly as the story progresses. Risa and Naofumi are a pair that brings some light into a pretty depressing at first glance story with their ideas and little quirks (especially Risa). Naofumi is very kind to a point of being slightly bland. Personally I don't mind MCs like that but if you're looking for more interesting one, it's not here. Other characters are definitely less fleshed out, but despite that I still liked a few of them, like Wakako and Isuzu, quite a bit. I felt like some other characters could've been handled better, but their screentime was so small to begin with that it wasn't a big deal for me. I liked the art quite a bit, especially some of the cgs are quite beautiful and there's a good background variety. Character designs are mostly simple but memorable, at the same time you can clearly see the sprites were made by a few different people. There are some technical issues that others talked about, I won't be mentioning them all, but some are more visible. Lines not breaking properly is probably the most annoying one. Basically, sometimes only half of the sentence appears after first click, and you need to advance again for it to show in full. It's not every time, but too often to let it slide. Another jarring thing you could've seen both in the first version of Koi Shikarubeki's demo and NekoNeko's previous release, Mizuiro Remake, is characters moving their mouth when talking... and never closing it. After they changed the engine, now they're actually closing at the end of the voice line, but they also move in a quite too fast and unnatural way that's not too pleasant to see. Mouth moving and eye blinking is also very inconsistent, it appears only once in a while, and most of the sprites are still. There's also sudden lagging of the game sometimes, nothing that makes you unable to proceed, but it's just awkward. Regarding Risa's muffled voice - it's mostly at the beginning from what I've noticed. Something that bugged me way more was the fact that there's no different sprite of Naofumi when he's a middle…